Poste Italiane not only delivers 6.7 billion items of mail, parcels, telegrams, faxes, telefaxes and other electronic media across Italy, but it also offers financial services and products throughout the country as well. In 2007, Poste Italiane went mobile, introducing its PosteMobile service to allow customers to use their mobile devices to access the postal and financial services that were offered at branches around the country.
By tapping into extensive client delivery expertise and proven assets, Accenture designed and deployed PosteMobile’s infrastructure in less than five months. This involved building 103 interfaces, integrating 41 systems, and enabling 13,800 Poste Italiane post offices throughout Italy to act as the PostMobile retail network, selling mobile services and supporting the services customers could now conduct through their mobile devices. PosteMobile has been transformational for Poste Italiane – customers can now conduct a variety of financial and communications services, like reviewing bank balances and statements and transferring money, from standard handheld devices. These transactions can be conducted easily, securely and inexpensively. The PosteMobile service was so successful that it quickly became the leading Italian mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in terms of customer base.
Poste Italiane was able to introduce PosteMobile quickly, securely and with minimal risks through tapping into the experience and platform of Accenture Mobility Operated Services (AMOS). The revolutionary effect that PosteMobile had on Poste Italiane is not only an illustration of what AMOS can do, but an example of why it was created.
“The rationale behind creating AMOS as a separate business unit came from the work we were already doing, mostly in the communications space, where the SDP (service delivery platform) framework was used to solve key business issues in client implementations across the globe,” says Fabio Mungo, chief technology innovation officer for AMOS. “We realized that mobility was quite a powerful channel, not only for providing information, but for improving business processes in different industries. Accenture’s deep industry expertise enables us to truly understand the requirements for each industry, and then apply mobile innovations that meet industry-specific needs.”
With that objective in mind, Accenture developed value-added vertical solutions on top of its SDP platform that can enable business process improvement in a variety of industries. For example, the AMOS Mobile Money Management offering includes mobile banking, which allows customer to check balances and execute money transfers from mobile devices, as well as mobile payments, which allows customers to pay for goods and services from their mobile phones. It also includes mobile point-of-sale, which allows businesses to accept payments from credit and debit cards and mobile devices. The vertical solutions are not confined to financial services. The AMOS Mobile Health & Safety offering, for example, includes a personal tracking solution that provides alerts users are in an emergency situations and facilitates emergency calls. As managed services, these scalable mobile solutions are ready to deploy in weeks, with sustainable cost and productivity benefits.
It is estimated that one trillion devices will be network-connected in just a few years. When put into the context that the world’s population is under seven billion, the trillion-device mark illustrates the ubiquity of networking and the necessity for competitive firms to have a clear mobile strategy adaptable to a quickly changing market.
In a recent study, Accenture interviewed 30 “next movers,” or companies that were not the original networking leaders, but are poised to take the next steps of embedding networking further into everyday life. Respondents from the automotive, entertainment, energy, healthcare, appliance and toys and games industries envision refrigerators that communicate with microwaves, cars that connect to Web sites and energy systems that link to sensor networks. These futuristic ideas are the types of solutions that a platform like AMOS could facilitate.
To launch AMOS, Accenture opted to go with a complete open source stack, using such open source solutions as JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company considered using proprietary products, but decided that because the platform would be distributed on a global level, open source solutions would provide the best flexibility and interoperability.
The openness of the platform does not end with its open source technology stack. While it is a secure, carrier-grade platform, Accenture did not want to limit AMOS clients to the vertical solutions it created internally. Therefore Accenture created a software development kit (SDK) that enables partner companies to develop mobile solutions that are integrated into the AMOS platform.
“The value of this is that our partners can expand and extend the solutions of our platform,” says Mungo.
The AMOS industry vertical solutions sit on top of a complete end-to-end platform that includes business support services, such as CRM, billing, and data components as well as operational support services. The platform is linked to external players such as network operators and the external business partners who help with delivering the vertical solutions.
For Poste Italiane and PosteMobile the next move even further illustrates the benefit of the AMOS platform. PosteMobile decided expand by tapping into growing demand for m-commerce. It sought to offer its customers the ability to purchase goods, such as books and other items that need to be shipped, as well as concert or train tickets, all with their mobile phones. PosteMobile aimed to bring the m-commerce service to market quickly and uniformly across the country.
AMOS was already supporting PostMobile and its more than 1 million mobile banking subscribers. In addition, AMOS has an m-commerce enabling platform that aggregates key players in the m-commerce ecosystem including merchants, banks, and telecommunications companies. As a result, AMOS was able to quickly and efficiently add m-commerce to PosteMobile’s business, and introduce a new mobile avenue for revenue. AMOS plans to manage scouting for and integrating new merchants into the system, and it also plans to provide other services like post-sales support.
AMOS’s reach extends beyond the financial services space as well. Last spring, AMOS designed and tested a phone app that allowed visitors to interactively explore an exhibit of Baroque painter Caravaggio held at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. By touching their screens, users could learn about Caravaggio’s life, zoom into detailed digital views of his work, see comparisons between his work and that of contemporaries, and of course, get practical information about tickets to the exhibit, exhibit hours, transportation, and Google maps of the best route.
